‘Thunder Thursday…’ takes place for the duration of a real-life and still-recalled storm of 2012, and opens with an epigraph from Nietzsche:

Invisible threads are the strongest ties.

Becca wakes up with a hangover; Jermaine lays in bed battling with struggles with grief; Emma heads home after her shift at the Newcastle General; Samira frets about a dispute with a neighbour; the same neighbour hasn’t quite come to terms with the loss of his wife. Mensah’s story is that of small community sometimes suspicious of one another, other times at odds, but ultimately –unavoidably – connected.

As a northerner living in the south, I would have bought this anthology regardless, but as we’re all – supposedly – avoiding non-essential travel, it has been a comfort to be transported home in some way.

From The Book of Newcastle, Comma Press, 2020.Eds. Angela Readman & Zoe Turner